


Hope for Happiness

by TheWhiteLily



Series: The Spaces You Leave Behind [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character perspective on canon scene, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, F/M, Gen, POV Mary Morstan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-14 17:46:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11788230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: Mary changes her mind.





	Hope for Happiness

**Author's Note:**

> For fan_flashworks "Teamwork"
> 
> Dialogue checked as always against Ariane DeVere's amazing transcripts.

“Gosh,” said Mary, staring at the resurrected detective in awe. “You don’t know anything about human nature, do you?”  
  
The reality of Sherlock Holmes had came as a shock to the system. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected: the reverent, heartbroken tone John had always used to describe the man had never quite matched up with the sheer obnoxiousness of the actions he was relating. It was obvious now, why.  
  
Oh, she’d been as much a fool as any of them.  
  
“Mmm, nature? No. Human?” Sherlock paused, rueful, and Mary’s heart clenched with a soul-deep kinship. “No.”  
  
She’d been shocked when she realised where John’s speech in the restaurant was heading. She liked him—loved him—but she’d assumed from the start that he was too bruised, too deep in his grief to form a new attachment. She’d thought him a perfect cover—her own well-buried heart the only one she’d been risking. But her heart  _had_ been at risk, far more than she’d realised. As had his.  
  
_Of course_ she’d been wrong. John adored her, just as she adored him, and she’d been too blind to notice it, too blind to notice the pattern in the people he loved, too blind to notice why it was that the two of them had always fit so well together.  Now it was too late.  
  
She’d been bracing herself, in the restaurant, to set aside her own happiness and do the right thing—to start the process of letting him down gently.  To be pleased, flattered, but to play for time and find a way to slowly, carefully extricate herself without breaking his poor, fragile, _beloved_  heart yet again. Her cover identity could only last for a limited time before she would need to ditch it without warning, or stay and die, but either way leave John behind.  
  
Marriage simply wasn’t on the cards for retired assassins. Not with someone they loved.  
  
But _now_ …  
  
“I’ll talk him round,” said Mary. Clearly, Sherlock was going to need all the help he could get, if he was going to be there when John needed him. And perhaps a little coaching, later, once she’d earned his trust.  
  
“You will?”  
  
He looked confused at the unexpected solidarity and she couldn’t blame him for that. She could see why John’s previous girlfriends had always considered Sherlock a threat.  
  
Not Mary. Sherlock was vortex; an unstoppable whirlwind of personality who would inevitably suck John back into his orbit no matter _how_ hurt he’d been.    
  
Sherlock was a  _godsend_.  
  
“Oh yeah,” she said, grinning at him. Of course she would. It would hardly be difficult. Not with _John_. Quite the reverse.  
  
“Mary!” called John, wisely having put some distance between himself and his old friend.  
  
Mary gave Sherlock one more reassuring look before hurrying over to the taxi.  
  
John had been so broken when they’d first met, so devastated by the death of his beloved friend, so completely without the support he’d needed to get past the terrible loss that had nearly destroyed him. Mary liked John far too much to put him through that again. It would have been unconscionable to let things between them get any further than they already had.  
  
But she was tired of running, tired of looking over her shoulder, tired of living in fear. Tired of waiting for her past to catch up with her.

And with _Sherlock_ back in his life…

She loved John, and he loved her. She could  _let_ John love her, as she did him. Till death did them part.  
  
“Can you believe his nerve?” demanded John as the cab pulled away.  
  
As though he hadn’t told her a hundred heartbroken stories of that man’s nerve, his voice strained with the tragedy that it was lost forever. As though that wasn’t precisely what had always drawn him to Sherlock in the first place. As though it wasn’t the same thing that had ultimately drawn him to _her_.  
  
“I like him,” she said simply, because even setting aside everything else, she really did.  
  
“What?”  
  
She caught John's incredulous glance—as though he couldn’t imagine anyone else ever seeing Sherlock the way he always had—and she smiled back at him, bright and full of selfish hope.  
  
_Yes, John. Yes, I’ll marry you. For as long as I possibly can._  
  
Sherlock was back from the dead and he was everything John had ever claimed he was and more… and that meant that she could have John without destroying him.  
  
She shrugged at his disbelief. “I like him,” she repeated, and turned to look out the window, still smiling to herself.  
  
Perhaps they all had a chance for happiness, now.  Even Mary Watson.


End file.
